Screams Before Silence Before Solutions
The Holocaust ended 17 years before I was born. Given how many survivors were alive in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s when I was in school, it is not surprising that a significant portion of my Jewish education was focused on the Holocaust. Add the thousands of movies, documentaries, books and articles describing the horrors of what the Nazis did, there is no doubt that my foundational morality is based on an understanding of the evil that has existed over time.
What Hamas did on October 7th was functionally equivalent to what the Nazis did during the Holocaust, just not the same scale of course. While six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, “only” about 1200 people (not all Jewish) were butchered on October 7th although Hamas has clearly stated in its charter that if it could have killed all seven million Jews in Israel, they would have done so.
The documentary by Sheryl Sandberg, Screams Before Silence, hauntingly describes the horror that Hamas inflicted on the people that were killed (not all Jewish, and included at least 32 Americans). The first responders and survivors describe what they experienced in vivid detail, without showing the actual murder victims for the most part. What they saw is inhuman, savage, and frankly unbelievable if you hadn’t seen the footage provided not just by Israelis but by Hamas themselves.
Like my Holocaust education, this is a documentary that simply must be seen even if you think you’ve seen it all or seen enough. For most people, you haven’t seen enough. You haven’t heard the stories of using sexual violence as a weapon of war. You haven’t heard the stories of women being physically torn apart, penetrated with all kinds of objects and raped repeatedly even after they were dead.
If we in the USA lived in a country that still followed the rule of law, I’d put every idiotic college student in a locked room and play this documentary over and over until they get it, maybe throwing in the actual October 7th footage that was screened only to journalists and government officials. I want them to cry over the unnecessary deaths, I want them to feel actual pain and want them to recognize how their minds have been captured by a death cult ideology in order not just to “kill all the Jews” but anyone that doesn’t follow an archaic and primitive Islamic radical philosophy. Yeah, in all likelihood, that means that you are next.
There’s so much political noise these days about Israel - always about Israel and not about the 300,000 civilians recently killed in Syria or Darfur or Uyghurs in China and so on. So much noise about a such a small country that is able to pack a big punch because…never again. That turns a people that have been oppressed for thousands of years into some kind of oppressor, explaining why the idiotic socialist wannabes fall into the trap.
The more likely reason for the protests in the USA is that we’ve let universities be captured by an ideology that hates independent thinking, democracy and capitalism. You know, what makes America the country with more potential than any other. Fixing this mess will take much focus and many years…a topic for another day, perhaps.
There are current priorities that Israel faces and it would be super helpful if the rest of the civilized world were more overtly supportive (excepting the United Nations - they should just be abolished at this point given that one of their organizations, UNRWA, was complicit in the October 7th massacre and their kangaroo court systems, the ICJ and ICC, accuse Israel and its leaders of a genocide that doesn’t exist).
Benjamin Netanyahu has frankly created a mess of his own making, due to maintaining his office through a collaboration with far right extremists that represent a very small part of Israel. Still, you fight the war with the people you have and removing Israel’s most experienced leader will not solve any problems. In fact, it is well known that the Israeli people and anyone that would replace Netanyahu would do almost every single thing that Netanyahu would do.
It is very hard to write this, but the priority for the Israeli government must be the destruction of Hamas, full stop. After watching Screams Before Silence, and especially seeing the cooperation of the Gazans in this catastrophe, I have to admit that my initial response was a WWII-style destruction of the entire length of Gaza, regardless of the number of casualties. When you see Hamas training ten-year-olds to fire AK-47s, teaching children to hate Jews, convincing women to explode suicide vests and then of course see young men gleefully shooting and raping victims over and over and over…there is simply not a lot of sympathy for the people of Gaza. Sorry. Not Sorry.
Practically speaking, it’s probably not a good idea to blast Gaza back into the Stone Age. Bad optics and all that. So Israel does what it almost always does…risk its own soldiers’ lives to kill bad people and limit the impact to purported innocent civilians.
Netanyahu wrote an excellent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in December that describes the plan, sure, at a high level, that needs to happen in Gaza, and ultimately in the West Bank as well.
Destroy Hamas.
Demilitarize Gaza.
Deradicalize Palestinian society.
I’m not saying that is will be easy, but that this is necessary and needs the support of Arab countries as well as Western countries. To that, I’d start with working to release remaining hostages without handing back any terrorists who would live to kill another day. Put a plan in place to transition Netanyahu out of government. Get the United States (just don’t re elect Biden and this will happen) to weaken Iran and its proxies. Again a longer story for another day but the fearlessness that Iran has towards the USA is totally based on the weakness of the Obama-Biden poor execution in the Middle East. Bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Peace Accords. Rebuild Gaza based on the UAE model with moderate leadership provided by Arab countries until Palestinians can rule responsibly on their own.
Most importantly, everyone in the civilized world needs to recognize the danger of Islamic extremism not only in the Middle East but in their own countries. Frankly, and I saw this on my last visits to Israel, success breeds complacency, and the Israelis dropped the ball. And 1200+ people, mostly kids, were destroyed. This really can’t happen again. No more screams.